• DocumentCode
    3092529
  • Title

    Von Neumann´s Biased Coin Revisited

  • Author

    Bienvenu, L. ; Monin, B.

  • Author_Institution
    LIAFA, Univ. de Paris 7, Paris, France
  • fYear
    2012
  • fDate
    25-28 June 2012
  • Firstpage
    145
  • Lastpage
    154
  • Abstract
    Suppose you want to generate a random sequence of zeros and ones and all you have at your disposal is a coin which you suspect to be biased (but do not know the bias). Can "perfect" randomness be produced with this coin? The answer is positive, thanks to a little trick discovered by von Neumann. In this paper, we investigate a generalization of this question: if we have access to a source of bits produced according to some probability measure in some class of measures, and suppose we know the class but not the measure (in the above example, the class would be the class of all Bernoulli measures), can perfect randomness be produced? We will look at this question from the viewpoint of effective mathematics and in particular the theory of effective randomness.
  • Keywords
    probability; random processes; random sequences; Bernoulli measures; Von Neumann biased coin; effective randomness; perfect randomness; probability measure; random sequence generation; Atomic measurements; Extraterrestrial measurements; Frequency measurement; Random sequences; Topology; Algorithmic Randomness; Computability; Effective mathematics; Markov measure; Measure theory; Randomness extraction;
  • fLanguage
    English
  • Publisher
    ieee
  • Conference_Titel
    Logic in Computer Science (LICS), 2012 27th Annual IEEE Symposium on
  • Conference_Location
    Dubrovnik
  • ISSN
    1043-6871
  • Print_ISBN
    978-1-4673-2263-8
  • Type

    conf

  • DOI
    10.1109/LICS.2012.26
  • Filename
    6280433